Thirteen years separate The Collapse Of Everything from its predecessor, Survival & Resistance. The gap seems particularly notable since Adrian Sherwood completed three solo records in the preceding decade. But the veteran English producer has not been idling. In the last five years, he has stewarded some fine new releases by Lee “Scratch” Perry and African Head Charge (among many others), overseen reissues by Dub Syndicate and Creation Rebel and faced the passing of long-term collaborators Mark Stewart and Keith LeBlanc. Those losses are part of what nudged Sherwood back toward the spotlight; the titular collapse isn’t just political and environmental, it’s personal.
Sherwood isn’t the kind to chide or lament, though. While The Collapse Of Everything’s album cover, song titles and accompanying videos make evident who he thinks are the bad guys and the nature of their crimes, his music steers clear of didacticism. He’s characterized The Collapse Of Everything as a soundtrack, and he freely appropriates elements from soundtrack history, most notably the lonesome twang and bray of Ennio Morricone’s spaghetti-Westerns. These Sherwood merges with his own history as a dub-informed doctor of sound, a guy who’s willing to radically transform sounds, but pointedly does them no harm.
Sherwood doesn’t just lay some echo on “The Well Is Poisoned,” the album’s collaboration with Brian Eno. He twists said echoes into intricate moving shapes and mixes them into carefully calibrated shades, and he deploys these elements among towering beats with a cinematographer’s knack for clarity of image. Sometimes, instruments and sound effects are like characters, carrying on dialogues and supporting each other as the action unfolds. But it can also be said that Sherwood is a master painter, applying stuttering beats and slowed-down, sped-up licks like dabs of paint that add up to striking portraits of a vibe. It’s pretty clear that all that time away has been well spent. [On-U Sound]
—Bill Meyer
